


steady as we burn

by kiiouex



Series: Rovinsky Week 2018 [6]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Hideous Co-Dependence, M/M, Road Trip, recurring character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-19
Updated: 2018-04-19
Packaged: 2019-04-25 00:00:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14366550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex
Summary: Ronan thinks Kavinsky killed him. Ronan thinks he killed Kavinsky. It feels important, but it would not change a single fucking thing in the world, to know who started this spiral.





	steady as we burn

**Author's Note:**

> Day 6, reincarnation + resurrection. I don't think this would ever happen but it is exactly the kind of garbage I like to inhale
> 
> Thanks as usual to [tk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid) for beta reading, she is the sun and the moon

It is the murky end of autumn, and the world is at its ugliest. Leaves rot in untended gutters, between bits of plastic and an endless stream of slushy water. The town they’re driving through shivers in the chill, and it could be Henrietta, if Ronan was ever willing to steer them in that direction ever again.

Kavinsky says, “Let's stop here,” so Ronan drives straight through, eyes on the desolate stretch of highway ahead. Fast food chains and last-stop gas stations fall away to nothing but low scrub and sad trees beyond, and a sign tells him it’s going to be an hour before they get anywhere else with a name. He doesn't want to stop moving until he falls dead across the wheel, but knows that’s a pipe dream when K’s in the passenger seat.

“Fuck me, man, I'm driving the next leg if you're going to be like this,” Kavinsky drawls. A trick that Kavinsky is good at: sounding like he's not burning on the inside. Everything Ronan feels is visible in the clench of his knuckles, but Kavinsky can deflect a lot with bad humour until it all breaks out brutal as a thunderclap.

Ronan alternates between wanting him to snap and wanting him to never speak again. The opposite always tends to happen.

Music on the radio, a choppy mix of aging hits and static, and Ronan lets it stream through his ears, thoughts in a very familiar loop of blame and grief and anger. It takes a lull in a song for the tap-tap beside him to come through, and he stares incredulously at the sight of Kavinsky lazily typing on his phone. “Who the fuck are you texting?”

“Skov,” Kavinsky replies without looking up, voice tensed for the fight they both know is coming.

“Fuck, man,” Ronan hisses, “ _You_ aren’t his fucking friend.”

Kavinsky slams a hand into the dashboard; the fragile radio falters, then bravely rattles on. “Look,” he says, “you told me to come and I came. Sorry I didn't cut myself off like you, but if Skov wants to keep talking to me then I don’t see the problem.”

“You're a monster,” Ronan tells him, “We are both goddamned monsters.”

“Funny how you act like you're not fifty percent of the fucking problem, Lynch.” It comes out cold and slow, from that ice-water well somewhere deep in Kavinsky, and Ronan prefers him as an oil slick, says nothing, lets his own guilt ride on his silent shoulders.

K keeps texting, Ro keeps driving and fantasises about veering off the road but doesn't, can't, and isn’t sure how much of that is a chain K looped around his throat. He sure as fuck knows he’s tried to put those ties on Kavinsky.

He feels sick and angry with every buzz of the phone in K’s hand, every message Skov sends, just picking up where he left off like he’s the same fucking person he’s always been. Ronan doesn’t know _what_ he is, but he knows he’s not the person his friends knew. He’s travelling around because he can’t look Gansey in the fucking face anymore, and Kavinsky’s with him because they’re stuck that way now, hands wrapped around each other’s ankles.

The road moves and the car stays still, miles gliding away, the radio stuttering out for five, then ten, then twenty minutes. It feels like a relief, as the afternoon dies and the trees loom in and it gets longer and longer between seeing other cars. Yesterday Kavinsky asked what the plan is, for when they run out of road, and Ronan had refused to answer.

It’s near dusk when they reach the next town, Ronan slowing, the stores and streets an imperfect copy of the last one, but very nearly the same. Kavinsky says, "The last town was better," and Ronan wonders if this is his fault, that some bad impression of Kavinsky made it into the real thing. He is not a forger; his dream things have always had more artistic license than Kavinsky's. But maybe he’s lost it, maybe it was stripped out of him.

He can never remember which of them died first. It seems like it should be the most important thing, who dragged who back into miserable life, but there’s a void where the thought should be, a roaring hole in his memory. Kavinsky claims not to know either, and Ronan has spent too many hours trying to find the lie.

They could afford to stay somewhere nice but the motel room Ronan buys them is exactly as shitty as he’s feeling. This is a mistake, because money means space, and the tiny little craphole he paid for has one queen bed, a television, and fuck all else.

Kavinsky looks at him, and it is a _look_ barbed and knowing and fed up, but he drops himself on the bed, worn mattress groaning with dust and grit and god knows what else. He's lucky he's his own supplier, lucky that even in the ass end of nowhere if he wants to take something all he has to do is make it. He swallows a little black tab straight from his pocket and then he's out and Ronan is alone.

Ronan stays by him, to see if he's still breathing, because Kavinsky is not allowed to leave, only temporarily tap out. That skinny chest moves; his breath is rank, the drags of twizzlers lodged against his gums, the only thing either of them ate all day.

Ronan lies down next to him, thinks about hitting him, thinks about fucking him before he wakes up, thinks about pressing himself against K's side and breathing with him like maybe they’re together by choice. They had been once, hadn’t they? He thinks he remembers, the thrill and danger, a pair of wolves jaws fixed on each other’s throats, and they had been gods and they had been terrible and now they are this.

He watches television. Noise and sound blur, and he sticks a hand into K's pocket to see if there's anything he recognises and trusts enough to take. All his pills seem old though, crumbling in their little bags, and the tabs are off-colour, turning translucent around the edges. Ronan doesn't know if it's a new mix or degradation and while his brain screams at him for an out, he can't take this one. Another thing to loathe Kavinsky for, however unfairly, though K’s sleep is restless and his lungs rattle like a radiator. Almost time to make him a new set, then. Ronan sets the tv to static and walks back outside.

Night falls in the nowhere town. Wood smoke curls up from chimneys, people hustle past with scarves pulled up over their noses, and everything is crisp and cold and ending. Ronan looks at the BMW and the fantasy takes him; getting in alone. Driving off. Setting himself free, finally, whatever form that takes.

He gets in the driver’s seat, hands on the wheel, keys in the ignition, and his heart begs for escape, for Henrietta, for home, twists itself up with longing until his head bucks. He cannot leave Kavinsky here, and the aversion is bone deep and as unnatural as he needs it to be. He can’t punish K for bringing him back, not when he brought K back too.

It’s one of the questions he can’t answer: why would he bring Kavinsky back? Because Kavinsky wired him for resurrection, a safety valve, granting himself full liberty to fuck up since Lynch can right any wrong? Or was it Ronan, real Ronan, too scared to be alone, fucked up and guilty and grieving, who couldn’t cope and couldn’t bear it and did it all on his own?

Ronan does not want to be that Ronan, but he doesn't want to be Kavinsky's puppet either, and though it feels so, so important, maybe he's glad he doesn't know.

The motel room looms behind him and the scraps of Ronan’s soul shudder at the thought of returning. For the first time in three days, he digs under the driver’s seat and turns on his phone. He has texts and calls and a sliver of battery, and he skips through it all to voicemail. Alone in the car, he puts the phone to his ear, and he listens to three days’ worth of Gansey’s worry.

“ _I hope you’re alright_ ,” Gansey says, voice distorted by a bad connection and fear, but still clear and calm and anxious _Gansey_. “ _I don’t know if it’s me you’re trying to avoid, but Kavinsky’s friends told me you’re both still alive._ ”

Ronan pictures Gansey having to beg Skov for third-hand news of his health, of him sitting up worried, of him too good to move on and forget like he ought to. Regret eats him; he hadn’t had the words for Gansey, why he had to leave, so he hadn’t said anything at all.

“ _I’m not angry, just worried. I wish you’d trusted me enough to talk.”_

He’d known things were missing, people and memories, Chainsaw shying away from his touch, but Henrietta had stopped being his home the moment he realised he didn’t know the road to the Barns. Realised that _he_ had never been. A stranger, an imitation, something innately wrong.

“ _I miss you._ ”

Ronan’s heart is rotting.

“ _If you ever want to come back, you can._ ”

The last message ends and Ronan presses into the curve of the leather seat, back and back until his bones ache and the seat groans and something has to give or it’s all just going to snap. Time was he could use Kavinsky to get him out of his head, but that’s no good now, too literal, too much bad blood and mistrust. Ronan is alone and all their combined demons scratch up the inside of his skull.

He goes back into the shitty fucking motel room.

They lie together. The room is smaller with the lights out, with the television off, with nothing but the two of them and Ronan’s storming anger crackling against the walls. Kavinsky sounds like he’s breathing through a sheet of wet tissue paper into lungs lined with coal dust, like Ronan made some structural mistake and this body won’t fucking last. Not that it matters, Ronan thinks, awake and aching and vicious, he’ll just try again. He’ll fix K’s organs, and maybe Kavinsky will make him a better forger in the first place next time it’s his turn. Thank God they can edit each other! Thank God they can never fucking die.

There’s a sliver of street-light orange through a crack in the motel curtains and he watches it, feels hours pass, feels the insomnia that never got cured dragging long nails right across the backs of his eyes, and everything in him is sinking. His heart presses on his spine, down to the mattress, to the centre of the earth.

Ronan thinks Kavinsky killed him. Ronan thinks he killed Kavinsky. It feels important, but it would not change a single fucking thing in the world, to know who started this spiral.

Their hearts are black holes. Their heads are clogged with impressions of memories, second-hand anecdotes, flavoured with each other's opinions. Contempt and self-loathing refracted over and over until they both drown in it. Everything is cut away or amplified, and what's left is the median of them both, hateful and furious and so determined not to be the one left alone.

Kavinsky’s back in the morning. Ronan’s phone is off and back under the driver’s seat, battery dead, unlikely to ever come back on. If Kavinsky notices the car door left unlocked from the night before he doesn’t say a single word. He drives, and Ronan keeps an eye on the road, to make sure they never turn around. Henrietta is not a place that either of them ever existed in, and he suffocates the third-hand memories that tells him otherwise.

The road stretches out, trees and scrub and autumn chill, Ronan sleep-deprived and Kavinsky dangerously silent. Nothing to do but chase circular questions and try to place the blame.

They are each other’s gods and masters and they are not anything like in love.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for sticking with me, you can find me on [tumblr](http://kiiouex.tumblr.com/) and at the bottom of a well


End file.
